Founding CTO

About the Company

AI-first business building autonomous agents for small and mid-sized businesses, under the thesis of Artificial Business Intelligence (A.B.I.): agents that run inbound, qualification and increasingly the full revenue engine for trades, local services, gyms, clinics and other non-technical operators. Founded in 2023 by Alistair Rollins (Founder/CEO). Trades as AI Agent Group; the original inbound qualification product retains the SalesAPE name. Contracted ARR in the eight figures and compounding. Product-market fit is established on the core inbound qualification product; the next leg is a multi-product platform. Backed by Northzone and Octopus Ventures across seed and Series A. Series B in the window. Customers report 40%+ uplift in sales performance after deploying an agent. In several deployments the agent out-performs the human sales staff sitting alongside it. Approximately 70 people across Bath (HQ, Customer Success), London (product and engineering) and California (sales and go-to-market). US and UK entities are both live, with international payroll run through an EOR. Stack today: Python, Django, LangChain/LangGraph, frontier model APIs, vector search. Deliberately unsentimental about any of it.

About the Role

The Founding CTO reports directly to the Founder/CEO and sits on the leadership team. The seat owns engineering, architecture and technical hiring end to end, with the existing engineering bench inherited from day one: senior individual contributors at tech-lead grade, an architect on the core platform, and a small, dense, AI-augmented team that has shipped the business to its current scale.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction of the company through Series B and the scale that follows.
• Architecture: Take a product that grew fast on a single line and give it the platform primitives to carry several: shared agent runtime, evaluation and observability, data model, tenancy, and the integration surface into the tools SMBs already use.
• Reliability of autonomous systems: Build the eval loops, the tracing, the guardrails and the on-call discipline that let the company promise autonomy to customers who cannot debug it themselves.
• Velocity: Set and hold an AI-native engineering standard where shipped product surface area, not headcount, is the unit of output.
• Team: Hire, level and retain the engineering organisation. Decide what is built in-house and what is bought, and be able to defend both to a board.
• Commercial fluency: Sit in front of customers, investors and the board. Own the technology narrative in the Series B process and in enterprise-grade security and procurement conversations as the customer base moves upmarket.
• First 90 days: Get inside the data before changing the architecture. Read the agent transcripts, the call recordings, the incident history and the churn cohorts. Publish a technical assessment the CEO and board can act on.
• Months 4 to 12: Execute against that plan while the business compounds.

Qualifications

Education details not specified.

Required Skills

• SHIPPED AI AGENTS IN PRODUCTION: Has built and shipped tool-using, environment-acting, multi-step LLM agents to real users at scale.
• SCALED AN ENGINEERING ORGANISATION: Has grown and led a team through at least one step change in scale.
• PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE UNDER LOAD: Has taken a single-product codebase into a multi-product platform.
• HANDS-ON AND STILL SHIPPING: Writes code and will be in the codebase in the first quarter.
• AI-NATIVE VELOCITY: Runs agents in parallel as a daily workflow rather than an experiment.
• COMMERCIAL AND BOARD FLUENCY: Has carried the technology narrative through a fundraise, a security review or an enterprise procurement process.
• SMB PRODUCT INSTINCT: Has shipped for non-technical users, mobile-first.
• FOUNDER DNA: Has founded, co-founded, or been an early technical leader at a company that went from nothing to something.
• TRANSATLANTIC OPERATOR: US-based, willing to travel, effective across time zones.
• CULTURE FIT: Founder-led, high pace, high autonomy, unapologetically commercial.

Pay range and compensation package

• Base: indicative $220,000 to $280,000 depending on trajectory and seniority.
• Equity: meaningful, pre-Series B, with a founder-grade grant for the right profile.
• Benefits: US payroll, standard package.

Equal Opportunity Statement

We are committed to diversity and inclusivity.